No More Smoke Screen
Susan Shapiro's funny new memoir Lighting Up ends as one expects it might, with a triumph over chemical addiction. What holds the reader's attention, however, is not so much what happens in the book as her smart, witty commentary on the life changes she's out to chronicle...
"I used addictions to block things I feared," she explains in an interview with The Jerusalem Post, "and ambition was one of them."
Growing up the only girl in a conservative Jewish suburban family of doctors, Shapiro says she was encouraged to strive to be a competent wife and mother, and used her addictions, beginning with chain smoking at the age of 13, to alleviate a desire to pursue other goals - such as becoming a writer.
According to Shapiro, this impulse to alleviate longing through addiction is a family trait. Her grandfather Harry and eccentric aunts were all chain smokers. "In my crazy Jewish clan," she says, "you were either a smoker or an overeater."
